This chapter examines Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) as the foundational cinematic origin for the city’s interwar and postwar image and explores its relation to Thomas ...
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This chapter examines Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) as the foundational cinematic origin for the city’s interwar and postwar image and explores its relation to Thomas Schadt’s 2002 remake, Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt, conspicuously timed to coincide with the early years of the New Berlin. One of the pillars of the film’s medium specific argumentation, the chapter also considers what it means to have moving images stand in for a lost place and how the photochemical origins (cinematographic indexicality) of the images come to elicit longing.Less

Remake : Berlin Symphonies and the Myth of the Weltstadt

Brigitta B. Wagner

Published in print: 2015-12-01

This chapter examines Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) as the foundational cinematic origin for the city’s interwar and postwar image and explores its relation to Thomas Schadt’s 2002 remake, Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt, conspicuously timed to coincide with the early years of the New Berlin. One of the pillars of the film’s medium specific argumentation, the chapter also considers what it means to have moving images stand in for a lost place and how the photochemical origins (cinematographic indexicality) of the images come to elicit longing.

Berlin Replayed explores the role of film revival and production in the construction of Berlin’s city image and film geographies at several distinct moments in history: the ‘Golden’ Twenties, the ...
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Berlin Replayed explores the role of film revival and production in the construction of Berlin’s city image and film geographies at several distinct moments in history: the ‘Golden’ Twenties, the divided but pre-Wall 1950s, the political turning point of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the start of the new millennium. This book argues for the importance of moving images and cultural policy in fostering collective urban nostalgia in the face of the city’s renewed function as the all-German capital. Understanding films as complex, intertextual archives of place in audiovisual dialogue with changes in the built city, Berlin Replayed approaches successive ‘New’ Berlins from the vantage point of the postwar, postwall city and its film industry—both enmeshed in coming to terms with the structural damage of the Second World War and the legacy of a politically and physically divided cityscape. Combining medium specific approaches with cultural historical and film analytical ones, this study focuses on four key problems raised by the relationship between film geography, profilmic urban space, film revival culture, and the production of cinematic space: 1. remake: how cities remake films and how films remake cities; 2. generation: how films created generational geographical affiliations that ran counter to official demarcations of space; 3. virtuality: how films and new media differ in their representations of Berlin’s layered past and their solutions to lost urban spaces in time; and 4. orientation: how filmic constructions of cinematic urban space instruct spectators in the perception of the changing built city.Less

Berlin Replayed : Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era

Brigitta B. Wagner

Published in print: 2015-12-01

Berlin Replayed explores the role of film revival and production in the construction of Berlin’s city image and film geographies at several distinct moments in history: the ‘Golden’ Twenties, the divided but pre-Wall 1950s, the political turning point of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the start of the new millennium. This book argues for the importance of moving images and cultural policy in fostering collective urban nostalgia in the face of the city’s renewed function as the all-German capital. Understanding films as complex, intertextual archives of place in audiovisual dialogue with changes in the built city, Berlin Replayed approaches successive ‘New’ Berlins from the vantage point of the postwar, postwall city and its film industry—both enmeshed in coming to terms with the structural damage of the Second World War and the legacy of a politically and physically divided cityscape. Combining medium specific approaches with cultural historical and film analytical ones, this study focuses on four key problems raised by the relationship between film geography, profilmic urban space, film revival culture, and the production of cinematic space: 1. remake: how cities remake films and how films remake cities; 2. generation: how films created generational geographical affiliations that ran counter to official demarcations of space; 3. virtuality: how films and new media differ in their representations of Berlin’s layered past and their solutions to lost urban spaces in time; and 4. orientation: how filmic constructions of cinematic urban space instruct spectators in the perception of the changing built city.

Chapter 5 ("Final Chord and 'Die Neue Welt': The Mise-en-Scène of Aufbruch")examines the only film from Sirk's German period to depict twentieth-century urban life. In the prologue that the director ...
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Chapter 5 ("Final Chord and 'Die Neue Welt': The Mise-en-Scène of Aufbruch")examines the only film from Sirk's German period to depict twentieth-century urban life. In the prologue that the director added to the existing script, two antithetical aesthetics appear to underscore the philosophical and political disparities that distinguish a democratic New York from a Fascist Berlin. Because the architectural symbolism of each of these cities may be read both positively and negatively (from a Modernist and a National Socialist point of view), after outlining the main arguments on either side, the author then attempts to resolve the vexed question of which metropolis offers the most desirable "New World" of the future, based upon the formal and narrative evidence that is provided by the film.Less

Final Chord and ‘Die Neue Welt’: The Mise-en-scène of Aufbruch1

Victoria L. Evans

Published in print: 2017-07-01

Chapter 5 ("Final Chord and 'Die Neue Welt': The Mise-en-Scène of Aufbruch")examines the only film from Sirk's German period to depict twentieth-century urban life. In the prologue that the director added to the existing script, two antithetical aesthetics appear to underscore the philosophical and political disparities that distinguish a democratic New York from a Fascist Berlin. Because the architectural symbolism of each of these cities may be read both positively and negatively (from a Modernist and a National Socialist point of view), after outlining the main arguments on either side, the author then attempts to resolve the vexed question of which metropolis offers the most desirable "New World" of the future, based upon the formal and narrative evidence that is provided by the film.

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of Aki Kaurismäki's career in film. Kaurismäki made his directorial debut in 1983 with an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. He ...
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This introductory chapter provides a brief history of Aki Kaurismäki's career in film. Kaurismäki made his directorial debut in 1983 with an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. He followed up at a prolific pace, writing, directing, editing, and producing four more shorts and six more features by the end of the 1980s. His third feature, Varjojaparatiisissa (Shadows in Paradise, 1986), was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in the spring of 1987 as well as for the Toronto International Film Festival later in the year. Subsequent films were selected for prestigious festivals, and since 1992, all of Kaurismäki's features have screened at the Toronto, Berlin, or Cannes film festivals. Nominations and awards received for The Man Without a Past (2002) secured the director's status as a leading figure in contemporary auteur cinema.Less

‘Who the Hell are you?’ : Aki Kaurismäki’s Cinema

Andrew Nestingen

Published in print: 2013-06-25

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of Aki Kaurismäki's career in film. Kaurismäki made his directorial debut in 1983 with an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. He followed up at a prolific pace, writing, directing, editing, and producing four more shorts and six more features by the end of the 1980s. His third feature, Varjojaparatiisissa (Shadows in Paradise, 1986), was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in the spring of 1987 as well as for the Toronto International Film Festival later in the year. Subsequent films were selected for prestigious festivals, and since 1992, all of Kaurismäki's features have screened at the Toronto, Berlin, or Cannes film festivals. Nominations and awards received for The Man Without a Past (2002) secured the director's status as a leading figure in contemporary auteur cinema.